


all in all

by dizzy



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:54:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24287701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dizzy/pseuds/dizzy
Summary: Dan goes out for a walk while Phil's Zooming with his family and observes the world around him.
Relationships: Dan Howell/Phil Lester
Comments: 22
Kudos: 133





	all in all

Dan wakes from a nap to the sounds of voices upstairs. He hears Phil's mum's laugh, as distinctive and recognizable to him as anything ever has been. 

He's glad Phil's talking with him. It gets him down more and more these days, the knowledge of how many months it's been since the Christmas visit, how many more months it could be until they see each other face to face. 

Sometimes Dan's up there with Phil, pressed side by side on the sofa while Kath's camera wanders all around the room. She's fond of showing them things - taking her phone out to the garden and giving them blurry pixelated views of what's starting to grow. They always have to remind her that if she's using wifi and gets too far away the call will drop. She fusses at them for laughing at her and they just tease more and it's good. It's comfortable. It's a family feeling. 

But Dan's always had a fickle relationship with family feelings, and sometimes that even applies to the one he adopted himself into. He hears Kath's laugh and wants to shy away from it; it's just the mood he's in today. Not bad, not good. Not anything, really. It's just a restless sort of neutrality that feels borderline oppressive. 

He can't go back to sleep, though. It's hard enough to fight his nocturnal instincts when naps are so alluring. If he lets it go too long he'll never sleep tonight. 

He gets up and his eyes land on a pair of jeans across the room, his dust-gathering trainers beside them. Through the walls and space between them, he hears Phil exclaiming over something. Probably telling another pigeon story. Kath and Nigel eat that shit up. Dan never has to go far to wonder where he got his tendencies from. 

It's healthy for Phil to get some alone time with his parents, anyway, Dan decides as he slides his feet into the trainers. 

* 

London is fresh off a spring drizzle, pavement still damp with rain the sun hasn't soaked back up yet. It smells like warm wet cement, a bit like a toilet, a bit like flowers with an undercurrent left by the clouds that aren't gathered anymore. 

Actually, it just smells like spring in London, he thinks. 

He adjusts the baseball cap over his stupidly messy riot of curls and plugs Frank Ocean into his ears as he walks - not runs - a leisurely pace to nowhere in particular. 

* 

He sees the flowers before he actually gets to them, a vast array of colorful bouquets and posters. It looks like a memorial to normality but as he gets closer he sees NHS written on more than one of them. 

A nice gesture, he thinks, the tiny voice in the back of his mind that spends far too much time on social media supplementing in _but wouldn't it be nice if they just paid the workers more_. 

Phil would call him a cynic, tell him to appreciate the gesture for what it is, that not everything needs to be looked at through the lens of what more someone could have done. 

So Dan picks up a stray rose and brings it to his nose, inhaling deeply. 

It does smell nice, actually. He's glad he did it. 

* 

He passes two women chatting. They're sat on opposite stoops in front of a building of flats, more than enough space between them. 

They're talking loudly, laughing louder. One of them is talking about the horrors of trying to educate her child. Dan grins at the space in front of him when he hears the words, _how do you explain to your child that you don't know how to do grade six math anymore and still convince him that he needs to know it for his future?_

The woman has a point, really. 

* 

He gets a text halfway through. 

Phil's wondering where he's gotten off to. 

Dan thinks about just texting back, but picks his phone up and rings Phil instead. 

"I"m on a walk," he says, forgoing any greeting. "Do you want me to pick up food?" 

"Yes, please," Phil says. "Let's do that place that did the eggplant whatsit that you liked. You're nearby it."

Dan's find friends iphone app grants access to exactly one person, but by virtue of that person being Phil he's not at all phased by the lowkey stalking. It's worth the peace of mind they both get; Dan can escape when he wants to without feeling like he needs to ask permission first, and Phil won't worry all that much when he knows where Dan is. 

"The one where they forgot and added cheese to your burger?" Dan asks. "You're ready to give them a second chance?" 

"Unless you've got a craving on for something else?" 

"No," Dan says. "I did like the eggplant sandwich. Put the order in?" 

"Already doing it," Phil says. 

Dan stays on the line, eyes drifting around as he walks. "There's a really fit guy running shirtless on the other side of the street. I'm about to pass him." 

"Take a picture for me," Phil immediately says. 

"No, I'm not, and you're such a creeper." Dan watches the guy, watches his abs flexing. It's less attraction and more like some sort of instinctive fascination. 

"You never complain when I send you creepshots," Phil points out. 

"Cognitive dissonance," Dan says. "By the time you've sent me the picture the invasion of personal liberties has already been committed. Me looking at it doesn't untake the picture." 

"Whatever you have to tell yourself to sleep at night," Phil says with a voice too full of cheer. "Order placed. Twenty minutes." 

"Another runner," Dan says, eyes tracking the man. "This one's wearing tight shorts. Ass full on display." 

"I hate you," Phil says. "You're the worst boyfriend." 

"I'm bringing you home food." 

"Fine," Phil says. "Not quite the worst." 

"Love you too," Dan says cheerfully, then hangs up the phone. 

*

He has five minutes to kill and he doesn't want to walk inside the restaurant, but luckily there's plenty on the pavement to keep him entertained. Colorful chalk drawings stretch from cement square to cement square. They're all a variety of skill and subject matter, stick figures and abstract shapes and faded x's and o's games. One of them says 'stay safe' - another just has rainbows. 

He does take a picture of that to send to Phil. Phil reacts with a heart back. 

A bit ahead of him he can see the artists at work, a young mother and her two kids. They've got a bucket of chalk between them and the kids. The little girl is shouting about the flower she's drawing and the little boy wants to know how to spell truck. 

Dan suddenly wishes he had some chalk himself. He's not so bold as to go ask to borrow theirs, and he doesn't even know what sort of message he'd leave even if he did. He just feels the inkling of inspiration, that feeling he gets once in a while when creativity just wants to happen. 

Maybe when he gets back home he'll write or give one of his video scripts a once over. Or maybe he'll order some chalk online and make Phil go decorate the pavement with him when it comes. 

It's much more of a Phil idea than a Dan idea, really, but they're both working on letting those boxes go. The muddling of two of them, the overlap of who they're meant to be that comes from a decade in each other's pocket... 

Phil can be a bit of a sarcastic, depressing ass sometimes if he wants to be. Dan can want to draw on the pavement with pink children's chalk if he wants to. They are who they are. They can do what they want. 

He's high on his own internal monologue, steeped with righteous indignation over comments no one even made, when his own phone jumpscares him with a text to let him know the food is ready. 

*

The two women are gone from their perch when he walks back by that building. 

He hopes they had a nice visit. 

He hopes the runners got their adrenaline high from the workout. 

He hopes the children sleep well that night for a mum that's putting the work into keeping them occupied. 

He hopes Phil's parents feel better having gotten to catch up on the world of nothing with their sons. 

He hopes the whole world is gentle with itself right now, because he's an overly emotional bastard who tries to self-protect with cynicism to shield his sentimental heart from harm, and that's alright. 

*

Dan washes his hands and sheds clothes that are tainted with the germs of the world outside, then joins Phil upstairs. 

Phil's already bubbling over with hits of the call with his parents to tell Dan all about. It makes Dan even more glad he'd opted for the walk instead. It's rare right now that they get to catch each other up on anything. 

Phil tells him a fantastic story about a stray chicken and its staredown with Kath. His calves are pleasantly sore and he feels a bone deep satiation with life as he sinks back into the sofa and starts to work on his eggplant sandwich. 

Life is weird, but it's not all bad.

**Author's Note:**

> for sarah <3 
> 
> [read and reblog on tumblr](https://alittledizzy.tumblr.com/post/618638612492435456/all-in-all-rated-g-15k-dan-goes-out-for-a-walk)


End file.
